“Good thing,” Batman replied. He dropped the Tomcat’s right wing, banking to starboard and away from the Su-7. “We won’t tell him our gun just went dry.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Yeah. I think we’d better start thinking about setting down and rearming.”
“Yeah,” Malibu said. “If we still have anyplace left to set down on.”
“What’s the word from the bird farm?”
“Under attack. The Indies are hitting the Jeff with everything they’ve got.”
Batman swallowed the fear rising in his throat. They’d thrown everything at the Indians, and still they were coming!
Batman pulled the stick over, heading back toward the heart of the fleet. “Let’s get back there and see what we can do, Mal,” he said.
“What do you have in mind, dude?” Malibu said quietly. “Ramming them?”
“If we have to.”
He held the F-14 in its starboard turn until it was again headed for the Jefferson.
The threat warning sounded in his helmet, and an orange light flashed urgently on his console. Colonel Singh’s Jaguar had been targeted by an enemy missile. Death was on the way.
Singh searched the horizon ahead, then looked up in the sky. He’d been expecting his target to launch. The enemy’s computers would be set to trigger SAM fire as soon as a target approached within certain parameters of speed and altitude. There … a white contrail, arcing sharply down from the zenith. That would be the missile intended for him.
Still calm, the Indian pilot waited, watching the missile’s descent. At the last possible moment, he fired the Jaguar’s chaff dispenser, then rammed the throttle into full afterburner. The Jaguar, already traveling at Mach.9, slammed through the sonic barrier, the shock wave raising spray in a straight line across the ocean’s surface.
The American SAM fell. Decoyed by the expanding cloud of chaff, the missile smacked into the sea fifty meters behind Singh’s aircraft. He neither felt nor heard the blast. At the Jaguar’s maximum low-altitude speed of Mach 1.1, he flashed across the sea toward his target, a ship visible now as a tiny black silhouette on the horizon.
He’d studied that shape in recognition manuals often enough, the sharp-prowed hull, the twin, blunt towers housing the vessel’s sophisticated radar and electronics.
He pressed the missile release and felt the jolt as the Martel dropped from the Jaguar’s belly. Unarmed now save for a Magic AAM mounted above each wingtip, Singh brought his aircraft up and banked toward the east.
“Bandit! Bandit!” Malibu called. “Four o’clock, on the deck! He’s launched!”
Batman saw the Jaguar, a tiny, toy-plane shape just above the Vicksburg, now some twelve miles to the south.
“What are we gonna do?” Malibu asked.
“Call Vicksburg!” Batman snapped. He pushed the stick over and dropped the F-14’s nose. “Warn them!”
“Oh my God, you are going to ram!”
Batman didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer as he tried to line up with the speeding missile. He could hear Malibu in the backseat, fiercely chanting a litany of warning. “Vicksburg, Vicksburg, this is Tomcat Two-one-six. Emergency! Missile launch! Launch!”
Singh banked right, angling toward the other Indian aircraft that were already beginning to straggle back toward the north and their home bases. As he glanced back over his shoulder in a reflexive check of the sky around him, though, he saw the distinctive nose-on silhouette of a Tomcat plunging toward him. With no way of knowing that the American carried neither missiles nor ammunition, he turned left, toward the east.
To the east, however, lay the Jefferson, thirty kilometers from the Vicksburg and battling for her life against the Indian planes that continued to attack her at close quarters. Another ten kilometers to the northeast, the guided-missile destroyer Lawrence Kearny was adding her firepower to that of the Jefferson, swatting down Indian planes as quickly as her weapons and Vicksburg’s Aegis controllers could identify them.
Seconds after he was into the turn he saw that he was not going to make it. The silhouette of the Jefferson, looming huge on the horizon beneath the ghostly white traceries of Sea Sparrow contrails, was unmistakable. Singh held his turn, angling toward the northeast as he pushed for more altitude. At better than Mach 1, his turn radius was impossibly large. He passed the Jefferson less than a mile off her bow.
Jefferson’s starboard-side forward Sparrow launcher swung about and fired, and the RIM-7 Sea Sparrow slashed from its container in a shower of packaging fragments mingled with white smoke. The SARH-guided missile streaked skyward at Mach 3, slamming into the Jaguar’s tail two seconds later. Ninety pounds of high explosives detonated in a searing flash, igniting the Jaguar’s fuel in a blazing fireball.
A pair of Standard antiair missiles fired from the Kearny flashed into the expanding cloud of debris seconds later, adding their detonations to the fury. Very little recognizable as any part of an aircraft reached the water’s surface.
Batman knew almost at once that he was never going to catch the cruise missile. Drag had slowed it to subsonic velocity immediately after launch, but its solid fuel motor slammed it past the sound barrier as it homed on the Aegis cruiser’s radar. The pursuing F-14 had been moving at barely 300 knots as it went into its dive, and the missile was now four miles ahead. Batman could no longer see it, save as a targeting square painted by his plane’s AWG-9 radar on his HUD.
Malibu continued trying to raise the cruiser. “Vicksburg! We have a missile launch, bearing one-eight-three degrees, homing on your position. Do you copy?”
Batman watched the hollow square settle across the Vicksburg’s silhouette on the horizon, a raging frustration and helplessness burning in his throat and eyes.
Since it gave off no radar emissions of its own, the Martel antiradar missile was not immediately spotted or recognized. Vicksburg’s communications department recorded Malibu’s desperate warning, but seconds were lost because an inexperienced radio watch-stander took Malibu’s report bearing—183 degrees — and thought he meant a bearing of 183 degrees from the ship.
He alerted the men handling tactical to the wrong part of the horizon, south of the Vicksburg instead of north.
At the same moment, Vicksburg’s computer registered the target approaching the cruiser at Mach 1, but the warning was delayed several crucial seconds by higher levels of electronic alarms, a priority system established to deal with each target in the order of its perceived threat to the ship.
It failed because there were too many threats. Machines and humans alike were swamped at the moment with targets of every kind, in every part of the sky. By the time another human operator noted the alert-flagged blip racing in from the north, it was already too late.
Even if everything and everyone aboard the Aegis cruiser had reacted perfectly, it would have been too late.
More seconds were lost when the human operator turned his attention to a second blip lagging miles behind the first. The Aegis system’s computers had registered that target’s IFF and recorded it as a friendly aircraft; for a fatigue-blurred moment, the sailor working the console thought that the blip it was chasing must be friendly too, a missile launched at some other target. The electronic displays in Vicksburg’s CIC were enough like video games that it was sometimes possible to lose track of what those moving points of light actually represented.